Richard's Favourites

These fifteen are mine, and I should warn you that's the only qualification they have. They're not the obvious ones, and they're certainly not the ones a gallery would pull out of the drawer for you, they're the frames I've kept on my own walls, and the ones I catch myself thinking about when I'm driving somewhere else entirely at four in the morning.

A picture usually ends up here because of what it cost me, and one or two of these took several seasons of going back before they came good. The swell has to be big enough to come over the pool wall, and small enough that I can still stand on the shelf, the tide needs to be near the top, and the cloud has to break in the right part of the sky at the right minute. Which happens a handful of times a year, and I'm not always awake, or in the right spot, when it does.

And others have nothing to do with difficulty at all. One or two came easily, on a morning I'd written off and was half thinking about breakfast, a couple are simply places my own family swims, and at least one I've never managed to repeat, because whatever the sand and the light were doing between them that day, they haven't done it since.

What they've got in common, if you're wondering, is that they still work on me, which is more than I can say for a lot of my own pictures. I look at most of what I've made, and mainly see the decisions I took (the ones I got wrong, mostly). But I look at these fifteen and I'm straight back out on the rock in the cold. That's the only test I've got that means anything, and it isn't one you can run from a screen.